A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (i have read the book txt) 📖

We are disposed, as an incurable mental vice, to accumulate

intension in terms. If I say to you Wodget or Crump, you find

yourself passing over the fact that these are nothings, these are,

so to speak, mere blankety blanks, and trying to think what sort of

thing a Wodget or a Crump may be. And where this disposition has

come in, in its most alluring guise, is in the case of negative

terms. Our instrument of knowledge persists in handling even such

openly negative terms as the Absolute, the Infinite, as though they

were real existences, and when the negative element is ever so

little disguised, as it is in such a word as Omniscience, then the

illusion of positive reality may be complete.

 

Please remember that I am trying to tell you my philosophy, and not

arguing about yours. Let me try and express how in my mind this

matter of negative terms has shaped itself. I think of something

which I may perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out of

court, or as the Void without Implications, or as Nothingness or as

Outer Darkness. This is a sort of hypothetical Beyond to the visible

world of human thought, and thither I think all negative terms reach

at last, and merge and become nothing. Whatever positive class you

make, whatever boundary you draw, straight away from that boundary

begins the corresponding negative class and passes into the

illimitable horizon of nothingness. You talk of pink things, you

ignore, if you are a trained logician, the more elusive shades of

pink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not pink, known and

knowable, and still in the not pink region one comes to the Outer

Darkness. Not blue, not happy, not iron, all the not classes meet in

that Outer Darkness. That same Outer Darkness and nothingness is

infinite space, and infinite time, and any being of infinite

qualities, and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy

altogether. I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it about

any not things. I will not deal with not things at all, except by

accident and inadvertence. If I use the word ‘infinite’ I use it as

one often uses ‘countless,’ “the countless hosts of the enemy”—or

‘immeasurable’—“immeasurable cliffs”—that is to say as the limit

of measurement rather than as the limit of imaginary measurability,

as a convenient equivalent to as many times this cloth yard as you

can, and as many again and so on and so on. Now a great number of

apparently positive terms are, or have become, practically negative

terms and are under the same ban with me. A considerable number of

terms that have played a great part in the world of thought, seem to

me to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no content or an

undefined content or an unjustifiable content. For example, that

word Omniscient, as implying infinite knowledge, impresses me as

being a word with a delusive air of being solid and full, when it is

really hollow with no content whatever. I am persuaded that knowing

is the relation of a conscious being to something not itself, that

the thing known is defined as a system of parts and aspects and

relationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and so that only

finite things can know or be known. When you talk of a being of

infinite extension and infinite duration, omniscient and omnipotent

and Perfect, you seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothing

whatever. When you speak of the Absolute you speak to me of nothing.

If however you talk of a great yet finite and thinkable being, a

being not myself, extending beyond my imagination in time and space,

knowing all that I can think of as known and capable of doing all

that I can think of as done, you come into the sphere of my mental

operations, and into the scheme of my philosophy….

 

These then are my first two charges against our Instrument of

Knowledge, firstly, that it can work only by disregarding

individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in

this respect or that, so as to group them under one term, and that

once it has done so it tends automatically to intensify the

significance of that term, and secondly, that it can only deal

freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were

positive. But I have a further objection to the Instrument of Human

Thought, that is not correlated to these former objections and that

is also rather more difficult to convey.

 

Essentially this idea is to present a sort of stratification in

human ideas. I have it very much in mind that various terms in our

reasoning lie, as it were, at different levels and in different

planes, and that we accomplish a large amount of error and confusion

by reasoning terms together that do not lie or nearly lie in the

same plane.

 

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure by a most

flagrant instance from physical things. Suppose some one began to

talk seriously of a man seeing an atom through a microscope, or

better perhaps of cutting one in half with a knife. There are a

number of non-analytical people who would be quite prepared to

believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or cut in this

manner. But any one at all conversant with physical conceptions

would almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2 with a

rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. Our

conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and

analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no

men to cut. If you have thought with a strong consistent mental

movement, then when you have thought of your atom under the knife

blade, your knife blade has itself become a cloud of swinging

grouped atoms, and your microscope lens a little universe of

oscillatory and vibratory molecules. If you think of the universe,

thinking at the level of atoms, there is neither knife to cut, scale

to weigh nor eye to see. The universe at that plane to which the

mind of the molecular physicist descends has none of the shapes or

forms of our common life whatever. This hand with which I write is

in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of warring atoms and

molecules, combining and recombining, colliding, rotating, flying

hither and thither in the universal atmosphere of ether.

 

You see, I hope, what I mean, when I say that the universe of

molecular physics is at a different level from the universe of

common experience;—what we call stable and solid is in that world a

freely moving system of interlacing centres of force, what we call

colour and sound is there no more than this length of vibration or

that. We have reached to a conception of that universe of molecular

physics by a great enterprise of organised analysis, and our

universe of daily experiences stands in relation to that elemental

world as if it were a synthesis of those elemental things.

 

I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme instance of

the general state of affairs, that there may be finer and subtler

differences of level between one term and another, and that terms

may very well be thought of as lying obliquely and as being twisted

through different levels.

 

It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to convey

if I suggest a concrete image for the whole world of a man’s thought

and knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all angles

and in all states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are

imbedded. They are all valid and possible ideas as they lie, none in

reality incompatible with any. If you imagine the direction of up or

down in this clear jelly being as it were the direction in which one

moves by analysis or by synthesis, if you go down for example from

matter to atoms and centres of force and up to men and states and

countries—if you will imagine the ideas lying in that manner—you

will get the beginning of my intention. But our Instrument, our

process of thinking, like a drawing before the discovery of

perspective, appears to have difficulties with the third dimension,

appears capable only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas by

projecting them upon the same plane. It will be obvious that a great

multitude of things may very well exist together in a solid jelly,

which would be overlapping and incompatible and mutually

destructive, when projected together upon one plane. Through the

bias in our Instrument to do this, through reasoning between terms

not in the same plane, an enormous amount of confusion, perplexity

and mental deadlocking occurs.

 

The old theological deadlock between predestination and free-will

serves admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take

life at the level of common sensation and common experience and

there is no more indisputable fact than man’s freedom of will,

unless it is his complete moral responsibility. But make only the

least penetrating of analyses and you perceive a world of inevitable

consequences, a rigid succession of cause and effect. Insist upon a

flat agreement between the two, and there you are! The Instrument

fails.

 

It is upon these three objections, and upon an extreme suspicion of

abstract terms which arises materially out of my first and second

objections, that I chiefly rest my case for a profound scepticism of

the remoter possibilities of the Instrument of Thought. It is a

thing no more perfect than the human eye or the human ear, though

like those other instruments it may have undefined possibilities of

evolution towards increased range, and increased power.

 

So much for my main contention. But before I conclude I may—since I

am here—say a little more in the autobiographical vein, and with

a view to your discussion to show how I reconcile this fundamental

scepticism with the very positive beliefs about world-wide issues I

possess, and the very definite distinction I make between right and

wrong.

 

I reconcile these things by simply pointing out to you that if there

is any validity in my image of that three dimensional jelly in which

our ideas are suspended, such a reconciliation as you demand in

logic, such a projection of the things as in accordance upon one

plane, is totally unnecessary and impossible.

 

This insistence upon the element of uniqueness in being, this

subordination of the class to the individual difference, not only

destroys the universal claim of philosophy, but the universal claim

of ethical imperatives, the universal claim of any religious

teaching. If you press me back upon my fundamental position I must

confess I put faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactly

the same level as I put my belief of what is right in art, and what

I consider right practice in art. I have arrived at a certain sort

of self-knowledge and there are, I find, very distinct imperatives

for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them

imperative on any one else. One’s political proceedings, one’s moral

acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one’s poetry or

painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements

assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives,

but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to

bring about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though

they were the universal Good and the universal Evil in which

unthinking men believe. And it is obviously in no way contradictory

to this philosophy,